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“To be clear, there’s almost no commercial incentive for me to do this,” says Moby, breaking into a chuckle.
The Grammy-nominated electronic musician is 57 years old, his well-cropped beard more white than gray and his head as bald as it was in 1999 when his breakthrough album Play made him an MTV mainstay.
A “vegan” neck tattoo peeks out from his gray hooded sweatshirt, which stands out just enough from his white wall and beige window curtain as we talk via Zoom, but his minimalist approach to decor stands in contrast to his penchant for intellectual verbosity and philosophical musings.
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“At the risk of sounding melodramatic, one of my goals in life is to never go on tour again as long as I live,” he says. “It’s not like I’ve rerecorded these in the interest of promoting an upcoming tour. Also, in the spirit of honesty and full disclosure, it probably costs more to make these orchestral records with tons of guests and fancy orchestras than will ever be generated in revenue. So it’s purely… and maybe I even feel a little guilty about this because it seems quite selfish… it’s just a labor of love.”
That labor is materialized in Resound NYC, an ambitious album on which Moby recreates 15 of his biggest hits and personal favorites with orchestral accompaniment and a powerful cast of vocalists. Grammy-winning jazz singer Gregory Porter, Lady Blackbird, The Temper Trap’s Doug Mandagi and Pussycat Dolls lead singer Nicole Scherzinger all make appearances on a tracklist that includes “Extreme Ways,” “South Side,” “In This World,” “When It’s Cold I’d Like to Die” and more.
It follows in the footsteps of 2021’s Reprise, which was also released on the 125-year-old classical music label, Deutsche Grammophon. Yet Resound NYC feels bigger and bolder, focusing specifically on songs written and released during Moby’s time living in New York City, a period encompassing 1994 to 2010.
“One thing that New York really taught me is how wonderful and exciting juxtaposition can be when it shouldn’t exist,” Moby says. “The fact that New York is a filthy, dirty, hard place that’s also beautiful and can be very elegant and poignant. Especially in the ‘70s and ‘80, walking down the street and hearing hip-hop juxtaposed with someone playing classical cello, juxtaposed with salsa, juxtaposed with Arabic music. I think that encoded itself into my DNA to make me think culture should not be siloed. Culture should be a melting pot. It should be this weird, unexpected surprise that if [the parts] were a little bit off wouldn’t work.”
Resound NYC embodies that mix of sonic flavors, bringing new depth and grandeur to beloved fan favorites, offering fresh and welcomed dimensions to familiar melodies. The album opens with the hopeful tinkering of a piano on “In My Heart” and immediately explodes into a wall of sound that ebbs and swells with furious passion until the final notes of closing track “Walk With Me.”
Moby’s career-spanning examinations of hope and sadness, mortality and exultation, feel richer and more alive as his palette of blues, jazz, funk, rock and gospel are recreated by a sonic army, each song hitting new dramatic heights to elicit tears or dance freakouts, or both.
“When I was really young, like nine years old, I studied music theory, classical music and jazz, and I didn’t love it, because it was more technical and academic than it was emotional,” Moby says. “Oftentimes the most powerful emotional expression can be the most rudimentary. You think of blues or punk rock. Think of Neil Young; very simple music that’s very emotional. I try to take that ethos, that spirit of almost reductive emotional simplicity and apply that to an orchestra — even though an orchestra by definition is complicated.”
“Simple” seems a strange word to describe Resound NYC’s expansive and maximalist layers of sound, but sit with each instrument’s part, and you’ll hear how a series of long-held notes and straightforward rhythms build one piece at a time to create moments of eruption and release.
“I find myself really resenting art and music that doesn’t have that generosity of spirit,” Moby says, “meaning the willingness to try and reach the audience, whether it’s one person or a lot of people, in a way that potentially — presumptuously — might be rewarding for them. A lot of musicians, sadly, are very afraid of emotion, like the pursuit of cool is more important than the pursuit of beauty or the pursuit of emotion. I, embarrassingly, would much rather ignore the pursuit of cool and simply try to create beauty in so far as I can.”
Moby no longer lives in New York. He moved to Los Angeles in 2010, a few years after putting himself through rehab to kick increasingly problematic addictions to alcohol and drugs. Fans who’ve read his autobiographies Porcelain and Then It Fell Apart know how dark and uncomfortable his struggles became. In the latter especially, the producer writes in detail about sloppy and desperate nights spent chasing fame, glamour, ego and sex before finally succumbing to depression and even a 2008 suicide attempt.
Just as with writing those books, the task of transcribing, recomposing and rerecording some of his seminal works from that time has been a strange mirror.
“It’s like being reintroduced to yourself, but you’re sort of a stranger,” he says. “I was a mess, and sometimes it was a fun, dramatic mess. Other times it was just an embarrassing mess. There’s a temptation to be dismissive and say ‘I was just young and stupid,’ but that was still me. I was that awkward person making bad choices and having bad priorities. To lead a full integrated life, sadly, you have to be willing to look at that Jungian shadow self. I always thought the Jungian shadow self was your cool, violent, sexy, dark, goth self. But I’ve come to realize mine is just awkward, uncomfortable and probably talks too fast.”
Living in L.A. has given the artist a chance to refresh his own lifestyle and perspective. It’s also given him a front-row seat to the cartoonish attempts its citizens make to grasp ageless glamour, “from face-tuning to vampire facials.”
“I’ve been having this conversation a lot because of the rise of A.I., but there is a psychological, philosophical, existential aspect to [the] many ways in which humans feel they can technically improve upon themselves,” he says. “It’s so much more interesting when people accept their humanity, accept aging, the vulnerability [and] frailty. True strength, as far as I’m concerned, is both accepting the entropy that comes along with the human condition and being willing to be seen in that vulnerable, human state. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there, but one of my goals is to push myself to try and express that, either on my own or working with other people.”
He speaks at length about his love of the human voice for this very reason. It’s the instrument that best reveals the nuanced levels of emotional complexity.
“It’s almost comical the number of singers I’ve worked with and the weird diversity,” he says, “everybody from David Bowie to Ozzy Osborne to Britney Spears. I can’t even begin to think of the hundreds if not possibly thousands of singers I’ve worked with, all in pursuit of that vocal beauty and power. When it works, it’s remarkable. When it doesn’t, it’s incredibly frustrating.”
One of his favorite tricks? Recording a singer’s first few practice takes under the auspices that he’ll “do the real passes later,” knowing he’ll most likely get a more vulnerable performance when the singer thinks they’re not in the hot seat. Technical perfection is so rarely the harbinger of emotion. Like Moby says, “Would you rather listen to a 19-year-old pop singer with perfect pitch who’s been autotuned within an inch of their life? Or Leonard Cohen singing ‘Hallelujah?’”
No such ruses were needed to capture the soulful vocals on Resound NYC’s version of “Run On.” One of the barest and most stripped-down tracks on the LP, the tune originally started with a big brass section, live drums, percussion, a quintet, electric guitar, bass and piano.
“I had this big version of the song done, and [singer] Danielle Ponder was visiting her dad, who’s 89 years old and very ill, in his hospital bed,” Moby says. “He remembered singing this song when he was a little boy, so she held her iPhone up to him while he sang it. She sent me the recording, and I threw away everything I had done for that song and rewrote it around his vocal. Then she came in and did a duet with her dad’s hospital bed iPhone recording.
“In terms of authenticity? Dear God,” Moby continues. “I could listen to just an isolated acappella of him singing that song. It’s so special.”
When he isn’t seeking to expose the gooiest parts of humanity on record, Moby’s been keeping busy recording his Moby Pod podcast and launching a film and TV production company called Little Walnut.
The team recently released Punk Rock Vegan Movie, a full-length documentary that explores the little-discussed connection between the rise of plant-based lifestyles and the hardcore scenes of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Moby narrated, directed and soundtracked the effort, which includes on-camera chats with members of Bad Brains, the Misfits, Crass, Fugazi, The Damned, The Germs and many more. (Punk Rock Vegan Movie is available to watch on YouTube.)
“As time has passed, I’ve come to realize that my day job is actually animal rights activism,” Moby says. “That’s my primary purpose, and part of that was making this movie and giving it away for free. I wanted to try and do my little part to remind people that principles are good, and compromising principles is generally a bad idea… This algorithm accommodating culture that we live in it, it’s making my brain hurt. Who on their deathbed wants to remember, ‘Oh, I did a mildly effective job accommodating algorithms invented by someone in China.’ That’s not a good life.”
The decision to retire from touring is part of his own eternal search for that philosophical “good life.” The whole idea of moving from plane to green room to stage to hotel over and over again feels “unhealthy” and “uncomfortable.” Instead, he’s content to sit in his studio “which looks a lot like a monastic cell,” transcribing his life’s work into orchestral movements, recording podcasts, writing activist documentaries and just generally being.
“I really love sleeping in my bedroom here with the windows open, waking up, having a smoothie and going for a hike,” he says. “It doesn’t pay well, and there’s no ego gratification there, but it just feels so much healthier and nicer than waking up on a tour bus in a parking lot somewhere, sitting backstage waiting for some ego validation. I am thrilled that I finally ended up in a banal place, that I’m very happy.”
LP Giobbi is busy as hell. After opening for her musical besties Sofi Tukker in Mexico City, playing a Coachella pool party and then the festival itself in the span of three days, it’s reasonable she’d be tired.
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And another big week is looming. Before her Coachella weekend two set she’ll open for Yaeji in L.A. and play two shows in Denver. After Coachella, she’ll trek to rave mecca Ibiza to open for Bedouin and speak at the IMS conference, immediately after which she’ll circle back across the globe to Guatemala for Empire Music Festival.
Despite this insanely busy life on the road — she hasn’t been back to her home in Austin, Texas since January — LP is bright-eyed and enthusiastic. Her presence is both energizing and grounding, reflective of who she is as an artist: joyful, optimistic, supportive, inclusive, self-assured and driven. Despite having just over an hour before she’s due onstage at L.A.’s Novo theater, she takes her time while sitting down with Billboard to discuss her new album.
Over the past few years, as she picked up steam with a string of euphoric singles (including “Sinner” with Bklava, “Somebody To Love” with Ben Kim, “Say A Little Prayer” with Amazonian Rockstar, “Carry Us” with Kaleena Zanders), she had over 13 labels reach out to her, eventually finding a home with Ninja Tune’s Counter Records. All the while — on trains and planes and in stolen moments in airports, hotels and rented studio space — she was writing her debut album Light Places, out this past Friday, May 12.
The album is a kaleidoscopic sonic tapestry of synths, percussion, LP’s signature piano riffs and a chorus of uplifting female vocalists including Sofi Tukker, Caroline Byrne, Little Jet and Monogem. There’s a strong undercurrent of joy throughout, yet many of the tracks showcase a different side of LP’s sound, particularly the stripped-down beauty of opener “If Love Is A Skill” with her longtime champion Sofi Tukker, along with the psychedelic sun-soaked vibe of “All In A Dream” with DJ Tennis and Joseph Ashworth and the sweet melancholy of “All I Need.”
The recently announced All In An Airstream Tour will see LP and DJ Tennis travel in an Airstream to locations across the U.S. including Joshua Tree, Berkeley, Big Sur, Asheville and New Orleans for pop-up performances. LP’s 2023 tour schedule also includes big festival sets at Lighting in a Bottle, Tomorrowland, Defected Croatia and Ibiza, along with a stage takeover of her Femme House brand at Elements Music & Arts Festival.
Beyond additional dates in Ibiza and Brazil, a residency at Superstition in Austin and multiple treks across North America, she’ll also be serving up her Grateful Dead-inspired Dead House shows for official Dead & Company afterparties — which, as the daughter of Deadheads, is something she’s still freaking out about. Jerry Garcia’s estate also recently tapped her to remix his 1972 debut solo album via Garcia (Remixed), a trippy marriage of LP’s love of jam bands, psych rock and dance music.
It’s all wonderful — and a lot to unpack. Below, the producer breaks it down.
Did having the format of the album and the pressure of it being your first help you hone in on your sound or the way that you worked on the songs?
Up until now, I’ve been a singles artist. The best thing about this process for me was that it allowed me to write B-sides [lets out sigh of relief], tracks that didn’t need to be hugely successful on Spotify or have a vocal hook in the first 10 seconds.
I wrote most of the album on planes, trains and in hotels. Then I flew to Paris and got in the studio with [DJ] Tennis and [Joseph] Ashworth and [Michael] Cheever. We took all the MIDI parts and rerouted them through vintage synths; we were in this amazing studio that had every vintage synth possible. We put everything into the same world sonically. We also recorded live drummers and layered that with electronic drums.
This album isn’t necessarily for the club, it’s more of a musical journey. I actually ended up making club edits for pretty much all of the tracks, which are the versions I play out, but the album itself got to stand alone and fueled me in a different musical way.
You talked about being in motion with a lot of the album, but where did you start and how did you know when you were done?
Well, you never know. You know you’re done when the label’s like, “We need the f—ing album.” When I signed this deal, I really took my time. I had 13 label offers. I picked the label thinking, “How do I want this music to identify? Who do I want this music to identify with? How do I want it to be seen or shaped?” So, when I landed on Ninja Tune, I had an idea of how deep I wanted to go with the album versus a more mainstream dance label.
I had hundreds of bits of songs and maybe 50 tracks. And I started road testing some of them to see what’s working for the dance floor, and maybe what’s not; I wanted to balance both. Along the listening process, the album told me what it needed. I just had to listen.
The album sounds like you sat down and spent time with it.
Oh, my God, I wish. I’m always writing and always touring. I’m hearing more artists all over the world and I’m deeply influenced by what I’ve heard and where I am. The music I’m writing now is very much for the club, I don’t want any vocals on it. It’s sort of the opposite direction [of the album]. It’s been fun to see where this body of music takes me.
I wanted to talk about “All I Need” and its interlude with the sweet voicemail — is that your grandma?
It’s actually [my tour manager] Xander’s grandma. We had just played this amazing gay music festival, Utopia, in Isla Mujeres. The day after, the promoter took us out on a boat, and Sophie was there and we were having drinks. It was one of those “life is good” moments. Xander’s grandma Shirley called him the next day and [left a voicemail saying], “I hope you got a good tour, I saw you sitting on a boat with a drink in your hand, looking like a millionaire.”
Light Places is named after your dad’s favorite Grateful Dead lyrics.
It’s from the song “Scarlet Begonias”: “Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.” I was in Australia and was feeling extremely ungrounded and untethered. When I’m home, my dad and I pass a notebook back and forth to write a poem together. I called him and asked if we could do that when I’m on the road. Now, we write a poem before every show I play. It brings me back home. On his 70th birthday, I made it into a book for him, and it’s now a merch item. It’s my favorite thing that I do.
That’s so great.
I was like, “Dad, I need a name for my album. What are some of your favorite Grateful Dead lyrics?” He sent me this huge email where he broke down all of his favorite lyrics to different songs. I had just finished a gig in Ibiza, it was four in the morning, and I’m reading his email. I was deliriously tired and read that line and “light places” danced in front of me. I realized, “that’s LP.” It’s so funny how language can give meaning to us. I realized that’s what I want to do, create emotionally light places for people.
When I first started pursuing music, I didn’t know if it was a worthy enough endeavor. I was in school and did a lot of women’s empowerment studies and wanted to be an activist. My mom said, “The Grateful Dead shows that me and your father went to would hold me through and are what gave me so much joy in my life. If that’s what you do, that’s enough.” That is what I want people to feel when they leave my show.
How have your parents inspired you?
I dedicated the album to them. “Sometimes you get shown the light in the strangest of places when you look at it right” is kind of an ethos of how they raised us. We’d come home from school like, “This thing happened and it sucked,” and my dad would always tell us [the tale of] a guy and he breaks his leg in the summertime, but then there’s a war and everybody but him gets drafted.
They also really instilled the importance of live music in me at a very young age. There was always music playing in the house and we were always going to shows. That was kind of our church, standing in a community of people, being part of something greater than yourself. Also, they’re front row for everything. Every iteration of everything that I’ve done, they’ve been there cheering me on.
I played with Dead & Company and there’s a great video that somebody took where my mom is wearing my merch, riding the rail and as the song drops, she just starts head banging and smacks the person next to her.
What was it like playing with Dead & Company?
It was crazy. It’s Dead & Company’s last tour, and I’m doing their after parties in some key markets. I got to introduce my parents to Bob Weir, their hero. My mom said to him, “Thank you so much for all the joy you’ve given my family over so many years.” And he put his hand to his heart and said “The pleasure is all mine” with the most sincerity in the world. Deadheads are f—ing crazy; that fan base is so intense. To have toured and done this for 60 years and to have heard that and still “hand-to-heart” feel that way was mind-blowing. It was such an inspirational moment to me.
And you remixed one of Jerry’s albums. How did you get connected with them?
I became a female producer and in order to be taken seriously, I started wearing baggy clothes. It’s really f—ed up. My parents gave me their vintage Grateful Dead shirts, so I started wearing those, and children of Deadheads started connecting with me. In fact, DJ Tennis and I became friends because I went to one of his shows and he was wearing a Grateful Dead shirt.
A friend was working in a studio and saw that I was wearing these shirts and sent me some of their stems. When I was livestreaming and wanted to make it interesting for myself, I took their guitars and reworked and re-pitched them and started sampling them in my sequencer and layering them over different things. I would take Jerry’s voice and warp it and start playing around with that over other tracks.
I did a livestream that Bob Weir was also on, and his manager saw my set and called him. The Garcia estate — his daughter, Trixie Garcia — reached out to me and asked if I wanted to do an official remix for the 50th anniversary of his first solo album, which was crazy.
Jerry’s voice is like my uncle. It’s the voice that I heard the most in my house growing up. It was overwhelming, and an honor. Then they asked me to play at their festival and do these after parties for the last tour.
When you got asked to do the remix album, were you worried about messing with it?
For sure, the pressure was so intense and so real. There are some old school Deadheads that f—ing hate what I did, and they were not afraid to let me know. At first, that made me really sad [because] I’m just trying to bring this music to my community. But I had a few amazing moments that made that not matter to me.
I played my first Dead House show in Eugene, where I’m from, and this father and son flew in from L.A. and New York to come to the show. Afterwards, the dad pulled me aside and was like, “We’re a dysfunctional family. My son and I do not get along, and we hate each other’s music. I’m a Deadhead and he’s a raver. This was the first two hours that we’ve been in a room and shared happiness, affection and joy together. Thank you so much for providing that.”
You occupy this psychedelic space in dance music that is very fresh and inviting. Is that intentional or just a product of who you are, and the music that you were raised on?
It’s intentional in the way that I had to work hard to find myself and be okay with myself. Once I let go of needing to be cool, or following other people’s [ideas of] what’s cool in dance music right now, it [became] so natural to me. I grew up a jam band kid. Once I finally was like “this is who I am,” it started flowing more naturally and was way more fun.
Can you speak to your creative relationship and friendship with Sofi Tukker?
I owe a lot to them. The biggest currency you can be gifted is belief. And they did that from the very beginning. They saw me play a horrible DJ set, I didn’t even know how to DJ yet, and I was opening up for them at an afterparty at a festival. I was in a band at the time. They were like, “We loved your energy, we want you to go on tour with us.” They were doing their first tour and had just released “Drinkee.”
I literally learned how to DJ in front of their loving audience. I was so f—ing bad, and they gave me so much love and support. I’d get offstage and Tucker would give me some tips and talk me through the set. They literally built stages for me and started a label [Animal Talk] for me to release music. They have supported me every single step of the way. Their friendship and support have meant the world to me. Seeing the power that artists can have on another artist’s career was a huge influence for me to start Femme House and pay that forward.
What’s the next era of Femme House? Where are you taking it? It’s grown so much.
That’s a really good question and also overwhelming. My co-founder Lauren Spaulding and I have tried to do dream sessions, but I couldn’t even dream that this was possible. I’m hoping it naturally reveals itself. I’ve sort of spent my whole life driving and grinding, and now I’m really hoping that I’m in a phase where I can lean into the more knowing feminine energy and wait for it to come to me.
One day, I’d love to have a [Femme House] festival and all that stuff. Education is an important part of why there are so few female producers, as is visual representation. So, we’ve done a lot of stage takeovers and live activations, that’s been a big focus for us the last few years. We want to meet more cool people who believe in this mission and work with them.
What has helped you the most in getting to this point? Did getting the right team impact where you’re at?
I always say I won the lottery twice. Once when I was born to my parents, and then again when I got my piano teacher. That has continued to happen, via the people I met in my life who have supported and encouraged me and shown up and given me opportunities. That’s mostly why I’m here. I do work my ass off, but it takes so much more than that.
I have a really, really good team now. My day-to-day Julie is a beast. I’m gonna give a ton of credit to Xander. I would not be here without him, on an emotional and physical level. He does what I do, except his job is way worse. He has to be the first one up and the last one to bed and always shows up with a smile.
Do you dream of a Billboard hit?
No, I really don’t. Fame is a funny thing. The tiny bit that I’ve experienced of it, I’m like, “no.” At the end of the day, I want to be on my deathbed really proud of my art.
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At the beginning of 2021 — a year before she introduced herself to the world as Ice Spice, with her signature cinnamon curly afro — Isis Gaston wrapped her hair into two braids and tucked them underneath a silk scarf. Wearing a black lounge set, she smiled for the camera while a sample of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” faded into the background and the hook of “Buss It,” rapper Erica Banks’ breakout 2020 single, started. The clip cut, and Gaston, now clad in a teal cut-out dress, dropped it low and twerked with her long, light brown locks cascading over her frame.
The viral video was just one of millions from the “Buss It” TikTok challenge, which helped Banks earn her first Billboard Hot 100 entry, a Travis Scott remix and a partnership with Warner Records in conjunction with her own label, 1501 Certified Entertainment. But for the then-21-year-old Gaston, who was just mustering the courage to record her own music, the TikTok trend and the way it boosted Banks’ career seemed like something she could achieve, too.
“It was so funny — I was already working on my first song ever that I was recording. I had already wrote little raps and sh-t before that, [but] it took me a lot to get to recording. I was halfway done with it when I did the ‘Buss It’ challenge. When I saw it going so viral, I was like, ‘Damn, imagine that was my song I was twerking to,’ ” she recalls today with a chuckle. “The next month, I put out my first song and took it from there.”
In March 2021, Ice Spice dropped her sharp-tongued debut single, “Bully Freestyle,” which was produced by RIOTUSA, whom she had met through a mutual friend while attending the State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase. For the next year-and-a-half, Ice refined her craft — and in August 2022, she independently released “Munch (Feelin’ U)” and finally experienced the success she had always envisioned.
“Munch” — or, as Ice defined it, “somebody that’s really obsessed with you that’s just fiending to eat it” — immediately entered the pop culture lexicon. After delivering the deliciously cynical line “You thought I was feeling you,” Ice spends the song shooting down voracious admirers and envious haters alike with cutthroat bars that bounce off RIOTUSA’s menacing production. In the official music video, she smizes before flashing cameras, twerking once again — but this time while wearing a pale green tube top, denim booty shorts and neon orange nails that complement her now-famous ’fro. TikTok users devoured “Munch” (which has since accumulated 2.4 billion views on its hashtag); Drake played it on his SiriusXM channel, Sound 42; and the song quickly became the New York drill anthem of the summer. Audiences crowned Ice “the People’s Princess.”
“I saw all of my supporters being like, ‘She’s the People’s Princess! She’s Princess Diana!’ ” Ice remembers. “At first, I was confused. I was like, ‘Um, Princess Diana? Out of everybody?’ But [then] I was like, ‘F–k it, she’s iconic.’ ” And judging by the way Ice, now 23, commands the luxurious high-rise apartment at 432 Park Ave. — one of the tallest residential buildings in the world, where our conversation is happening — she’s now well aware of her sovereignty. She struts the hallway in cotton candy-toned regalia: a baby blue velvet cropped hoodie, MRDR BRVDO jeans with pink distressed patches and cloud-dyed Air Force 1s. Her omnipresent $100,000 chain featuring a diamond-encrusted cartoon rendering of her face hangs around her neck, and she frequently checks herself out in a metallic pink Balenciaga Le Cagole rhinestone-embossed purse with a heart-shaped mirror.
Alaïa bodysuit, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Le Vian jewelry.
Christian Cody
Last fall, about a month after the release of “Munch,” Ice signed a label deal with 10K Projects and Capitol Records. At the beginning of 2023, she treated her fans (collectively called the Spice Cabinet, individually known as Munchkins) to her debut EP, Like..?, a six-song set named for her signature interjection, which further flashed her lyrical vocabulary and expanded her drill sound. The project debuted in the top 10 of Billboard’s Top Rap Albums chart and the top 40 of the Billboard 200, while its Lil Tjay-assisted “Gangsta Boo” debuted at No. 82 on the Hot 100, marking Ice’s debut entry on the chart. When she joined forces with fellow online sensation PinkPantheress on “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” in February, the track vaulted both artists to No. 3 on the Hot 100.
Like her memorable one-liners, Ice’s hits keep coming: In April, her idol, Nicki Minaj, hopped on the remix of Like..? track “Princess Diana,” which debuted at No. 4 on the Hot 100 and became the first No. 1 on Hot Rap Songs by two co-billed women in its 34-year history.
“The first time I met her, I knew she was special. I got that tingling feeling [I get] every time when you meet that [kind of] artist,” says Michelle Jubelirer, CEO/chair of Capitol Music Group. “I knew she was a global superstar in the making.”
But despite projecting confidence, Ice is still adjusting to the spotlight. And if she was once a bit shocked by the Princess Diana comparisons, she has lately come to understand the late icon’s plight a little better, as she’s increasingly faced her own share of alarming encounters with onlookers. When she performed at a New York Fashion Week afterparty in February, fans swarmed her by the DJ booth, prompting security to escort her offstage midperformance. Ice even had to push people off herself.
“I’m not going to lie: I was scared in that moment. I was kind of worried because we was a little outnumbered that night,” she confesses. But her tone swiftly shifts to gratitude: “But looking back, I was like, ‘This is really a blessing being able to just see how excited people are to see me perform.’ ”
Balancing exposure and privacy is tough for any rising artist and their team. Her manager, James Rosemond Jr., remembers hip-hop super-agent Cara Lewis (who now counts Ice as a client alongside the likes of Travis Scott and Eminem) and promoters blowing up his phone after the performance about what had happened, even though it never posed a threat to him, given the security measures they had in place.
“It’s been eight months since ‘Munch,’ and as anybody can see, it went from zero to 100 — real quick,” he says in April, nodding to the Drake song. He met Ice in March 2022 through his client Diablo, a DJ-producer who was working with her for the first time at New York recording studio Blast Off Productions. “Me and her manifested each other — I was looking for a female act, and she was looking for a manager,” he says. Rosemond, 30, now manages Ice, RIOTUSA and Diablo under Mastermind Artists, the management and label company that he started in 2019. But the last year has taught him that management isn’t just about discovering and developing great artists — it’s also about protecting them. And at this transitional stage in Ice’s career, where she falls somewhere between rising rap star and culture-shifting sensation, Rosemond is having “real conversations” with her about what’s happening while giving her the space to say no.
Jubelirer and 10K co-presidents Zach Friedman and Tony Talamo are betting on Ice to become the next “global superstar,” a term all three use independently. But as they root for her to take off — “It’s a rocket, and we’re just holding on,” Friedman says — she’s still finding her footing. “It’s been less than a year of me being famous, so it is definitely an adjustment,” she admits. As she aims to live up to the lofty title that industry patrons and fans have anointed her with while still protecting her peace and privacy, Ice is trying to enjoy the lightning-fast ride while steeling herself for all that comes with it.
Isis Gaston was born one of one.
Entering the world on Jan. 1, 2000, she was practically predestined to rule her generation. Growing up in the Bronx, she admits with a sigh, she found her birthday “annoying, [because] everybody else is just celebrating New Year’s, but it’s my birthday.” But long before she assumed any title, she knew how to set an example. Ice’s four younger siblings looked up to her, and in turn, she looked up to her father — an underground rapper.
“While I was growing up, I wasn’t like, ‘My father’s a rapper, so I’m going to be one, too,’ ” she says; still, “seeing somebody go to the studio and always hearing hip-hop music,” like New York heavyweights Jay-Z, 50 Cent and Wu-Tang Clan, planted the seeds for her career. And while she didn’t manifest becoming a rapper, “I did manifest being successful,” she says matter-of-factly. Ice credits her mother, along with Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret, for teaching her about manifestation and the law of attraction when she was just 10 years old.
Miu Miu top and skirt, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Le Vian and Jennifer Fisher jewelry.
Christian Cody
It wasn’t until 2019, when fellow New Yorker Pop Smoke popped off, that Ice grew interested in drill music, the hip-hop subgenre characterized by nihilistic and realistic lyrics about the inescapable prevalence of violence in major cities, punctuated with gunplay-like production loaded with rattling hi-hats and ad-libs like “Brrrrrrrap!” and “Grrrrr!”
Drill originated on Chicago’s South Side in the early 2010s, defined by dark, slow tempos (borrowed from Atlanta trap music) and popularized by Chief Keef and Lil Durk, among others. Soon, the style traveled across the pond — and intermingled with grime, garage and road rap, molding U.K. drill. In Brooklyn, Bobby Shmurda and Rowdy Rebel started borrowing from Chicago drill’s sinister storytelling and injecting New York’s boisterous energy. They rapidly became hometown heroes: Both rappers scored label deals with Epic Records, and Shmurda’s smash “Hot N—a” landed in the top 10 of the Hot 100. Yet their promising come-ups — and New York drill’s emergence — stalled in December 2014, when Shmurda, Rebel and affiliates in the GS9 hip-hop collective were arrested on conspiracy to murder, weapons possession and reckless endangerment charges.
But within five years, the Brooklyn drill scene had a new figurehead: The 20-year-old Smoke, who lent his gruff yet suave voice to ominous 808 drum loops, courtesy of U.K. drill pioneer 808MeloBeats, for hits like “Welcome to the Party” and “Dior” that became street anthems. “I feel like Pop Smoke brought this new life back to it, and I was just obsessed,” Ice says of the rapper, who was murdered in February 2020. “He brought a lot of light into New York and definitely paved the way for a lot of current drill rappers.”
When Ice enrolled at SUNY Purchase, she pursued friendships with producers who could help her make her own mark in the drill scene. “I had a couple producer friends on campus that never would f–king send me a beat. And I’m like, ‘Hello?’ Nobody wanted to send me beats but RIOT,” she says of the producer — the son of WQHT (Hot 97) New York DJ/radio personality DJ Enuff — who became her go-to collaborator.
“Ice and RIOT are like Shaq and Kobe. You just don’t break it up. You let them do their thing, and they’re going to cook every night,” says 10K’s Talamo.
Alaïa playsuit, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Tiffany & Co. jewelry.
Christian Cody
The duo started off by sampling 2010s EDM hits like Zedd and Foxes’ “Clarity” and Martin Garrix and Bebe Rexha’s “In the Name of Love” to soften drill’s rough edges and contrast Ice’s low-pitched, laid-back voice with pitched-up, bubblegum pop melodies and flashes of tenderness in the lyrics.
“Back in 2021, there was a big wave of sample drill where they were sampling a whole bunch of popular tracks. But I like finding things that either I had a connection to or are abstract samples,” RIOT explains. “So with ‘No Clarity,’ I was going through old EDM tracks, and when I came across it, it was real nostalgic for me because I loved that song when I was 12. I’m like, ‘Yo, we have to do this one!’ I made the beat, and Ice loved it.”
They didn’t clear the sample for the song, released in November 2021, but Zedd let it fly — and even invited Ice to perform it with him at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in March. “Funny thing about that performance is right before I went onstage, his laptop wasn’t working. And he said that that hadn’t happened to him in 10 years, so I was like, ‘It’s because I’m here,’ ” she recalls. “It ended up working out fine. I went out there and did ‘In Ha Mood’ and ‘No Clarity’ real quick, but the crowd was definitely a different crowd that I’ve never performed for.”
Zedd’s stage setup at Ultra, with smoke cannons firing right at the artist, also felt foreign to her. But as she has quickly graduated to large stages, one aspect of performance has been unexpectedly familiar: The athleticism required to run around them brings Ice back to her volleyball days in high school and college. “That’s what be motivating me to go into the gym. I’ve been working out lately, and I’m going to have that breath control down pat, feel me?” she says.
Christian Cody
While Ice adapts to bigger stages, Rosemond is adapting to higher-stakes management operations — and drawing from old inspirations. Those include one of his college textbooks, All You Need To Know About the Music Business by Donald S. Passman, or as Rosemond calls it, “the bible of the music business.” After dropping out of Bay State College in Boston, he flew to Los Angeles to meet with Passman, a family friend, to get advice that helped him start his previous management company, RoyalDream Projects, in 2012. And like Ice, he also learned a lot from his father, James “Jimmy Henchman” Rosemond, the famed hip-hop mogul who formerly managed The Game, Gucci Mane and many more.
“I was privy to a lot of his deal-making, and me being a sponge allowed me to soak up what contracts looked like and how to approach labels,” Rosemond says. Before labels began approaching Ice, he advised her, “ ‘Let’s do it ourselves first.’ Deals came to her — production deals, 360 deals — but they were deals that I knew could be better, and in order to get a better deal, you have to go out and do it yourself.”
While Ice’s team independently released her first two major singles, “Munch” and “Bikini Bottom,” Rosemond tapped Create Music Group for distribution, after the company partnered with WorldStar HipHop in 2021 to launch a full-service music distribution hub called WorldStar Distro. “I knew Create Music had sister companies — WorldStar, Genius, Datpiff. So my thing was, ‘Here’s this record. Here’s the vision,’ ” he explains. From there, Rosemond made sure those branches executed the vision: WorldStar HipHop premiered Ice’s music videos on its YouTube channel, while Genius had her perform “Munch” on its Open Mic series. “We was able to be very strategic with it — and it worked.”
Christian Cody
To help him and Ice navigate the ensuing label bidding war and emerge with the friendliest possible terms, including owning her masters and publishing, Rosemond hired his high school acquaintance Leon Morabia, an attorney from the newly merged powerhouse firm Mark Music and Media Law, P.C., which represents established acts from Billie Eilish to Guns N’ Roses. So when he and Ice arrived at a dinner meeting with 10K and Capitol at Nobu Malibu last summer, “We wasn’t freestyling it. We had that vision walking in,” he says.
“We were not going to leave that dinner until we knew that she would be an artist that we would be building together and working together until the day she stops performing,” says Jubelirer.
After Morabia made sure the most important terms were in her favor, Ice inked her deal with 10K and Capitol, which immediately began assisting in the promotion of singles to radio and clearing samples, like Diddy’s “I Need a Girl (Pt. 2)” on “Gangsta Boo,” released in January. But Ice had secured assurances that her creative autonomy would remain intact. “No one on the label side touches the music. There is no traditional A&R with her. No one’s picking beats, no one’s saying, ‘Do this, do that,’ ” Friedman says. “It’s all her. We’re on her schedule.”
Ice is currently prepping the deluxe version of Like..? for this summer; while that project keeps her in the discourse, she can complete and release her debut album at her own pace. But Ice and RIOTUSA are manifesting even bigger things ahead.
“I just want more accolades. I just want to put out more music,” she says, while RIOTUSA adds, “I want to have multiple No. 1s on the Hot 100 chart. I want to have Grammys. I just want to have timeless music.” He followed Ice’s lead by writing down his goals in a journal every day. “At first, I was a little skeptical, feel me? But I started writing, and literally every single thing we started writing just started coming true. I’m on my fourth book now.”
When asked about their dream collaboration, both Ice and RIOTUSA are at a loss for words because they’ve already checked it off with Minaj. Ice credits Rosemond for ultimately making her dream come true. “I’m listening to her. Who’s her idol? Nicki, Nicki, Nicki, Nicki, Nicki. My thing is, how do I get her Nicki? And it’s being persistent,” he says. “It took months to get Nicki on board, and it happened.” (In tandem with the remix’s release, Minaj announced on her Queen Radio show that she established a partnership with Ice under Minaj’s new label, Heavy On It, but Rosemond declined to comment on the matter; Minaj’s reps did not respond to a request for comment.)
The destined alliance between rap’s newly crowned princess and its long-reigning queen had been fulfilled, exciting the Spice Cabinet and the Barbz. At the end of the music video, Ice and Minaj exchange wide-eyed glances and grins à la Minaj and Beyoncé’s 2015 “Feeling Myself” video, which Rosemond says was unplanned but demonstrates their “chemistry. And that’s big with Ice. She wants to work with people who want to work with her, but she’s very selective. It has to make sense.”
PinkPantheress felt similarly about “Boy’s a liar” when her label, Warner Music UK, pressed her to release a remix. “People kept mentioning it to me for charting reasons, but I was not really interested,” she tells Billboard, adding that she was only open to the idea if it involved another up-and-coming female artist who piqued her interest.
“[Ice] was kind of perfect. I saw she was following me, so I casually asked her if she would be down to do a remix. And she was really up for it. It was just literally through the DMs,” Pink recalls, while Ice adds, “I knew our fans would really appreciate it because I saw them wanting us to collab for a little bit.” In a matter of days, Ice sent over her verse, and Pink’s engineer, Jonny Breakwell, added it to the track. The next week, the British singer-songwriter-producer jetted to New York to shoot the video, and she instantly connected with her Bronx-bred collaborator. “Being Gen Z ‘It’ girls of the internet era, I feel like we had a lot in common, even though we’re from two completely different places,” says Pink.
The professional camera crew captured the duo’s chemistry, but one fan’s surreptitiously filmed video started a “wildfire,” as Ice calls it, on TikTok one month before “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” dropped. After she was caught off guard by the remix blasting throughout the neighborhood, the guerrilla filmer had spotted Ice and Pink filming in a nearby fire escape. She wasn’t the only local who observed the shoot. “There was a little group of boys down the block just screaming the whole time,” Ice recalls. “And then they was on the roof of the other building, watching us do the roof scenes, screaming. It was so funny.”
By now, Ice has learned that such distractions come with the territory — after all, as she raps in the song, “In the hood, I’m like Princess Diana” — and aren’t likely to let up any time soon. If she can laugh at them or make them work in her favor, she’ll eventually become the global superstar she intends to be. She’s already a face of two huge celebrity brands, Beyoncé’s Ivy Park and Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS. And she’s not shying away from the cameras any time soon: She’s also interested in acting. “But right now, I’m focused on music,” she says. “I’m still learning a lot, to be honest. But I’m so happy I’ve put in that time and that work — because it’s paying off.”
This story will appear in the May 13, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Clad in a backwards baseball cap and tie-dye hoodie that complement his chill demeanor, Illenium fills the frame of my computer screen.
“Now,” he says, “it’s like super-grind mode.”
Indeed, the producer has spent the last five months painstakingly designing his upcoming tour. The run is not only his biggest yet, but one that firmly places him in the elite echelon of electronic artists who can play arenas, stadiums and amphitheaters, venues that few acts in this genre ultimately reach.
Following the release of his self-titled fifth studio album this past Friday (April 28), on May 27 Illenium will set out on a 37-date tour with stops across North America, Europe, and Australia. The 27-show domestic leg, which cost nearly $9 million to produce and which will position Illenium on 60- to 80-foot-wide stages, is the largest of the three. The run will be supported by six semis and a stockpile of pyro.
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After the self-titled set, released via Warner Records, went off to a vinyl pressing plant upon Illenium finishing it last November, the DJ-producer began conceiving its live show, a process during which he transformed the album he’d just made for the live format. This audiovisual experience — complete with longstanding Illenium-centric imagery of phoenixes and ash trees — narratively positions ILLENIUM as the prequel to his four prior albums, while indulging his love for fantasy and world-building.
“The show creates the baseline world that my music lives in,” he says. “If you watch it five times, you’ll notice new things each time and will see how deep it is.”
After opening at the Gorge Amphitheater on May 27, the amphitheater-focused North American leg will make stops at 13 other open-air venues, including three stadiums. Not counting the two festivals included in the tour — Electric Forest in Michigan and Veld Music Festival in Ontario– nearly half of its domestic dates are at outdoor venues.
The decision to lean more heavily into amphitheaters and other open-air spaces comes down to their ability to accommodate Illenium’s large-scale production needs.
“Amphitheaters usually fit our big goals and dreams; we have a lot of custom pieces that require a large stage,” says Illenium’s manager Sean Flynn. “Whereas a lot of the time when we come up with some crazy production that fits some huge stage and we have to work around a smaller stage, amphitheaters already fit what we want to do.”
Synchronicity between a venue’s capabilities and the specs of this tour is paramount, particularly given its full-band format that echoes the live rock focused sound of the latest album. Like 2019’s ASCEND tour, the ILLENIUM live show will feature a full band, including a pianist, drummer, guitarist, and, for the first time, a string instrumentalist. (Illenium will also play guitar and some drum pads.) The space required by these musicians, along with supporting acts like hardcore band I Prevail, demanded venues that could hold all these elements.
“We’d rather sell 85% of a 20,000-person venue with every production need that we want,” Illenium says, “versus a sold-out 10,000-person venue with production restrictions.”
Although the ASCEND tour took Illenium across the country in 2019 and later sent him to Australia at the start of 2020, he and his team did not announce the tour’s domestic and international dates simultaneously. He says their choice to do so this time around feels “much more impactful.” Fans appear to agree: 27 days out from the first stop, the tour has sold roughly 160,000 tickets.
In October, the tour heads to Europe and come November, to Australia. Some of the stages in these European venues are “much smaller” than those in the United States and Australia — just one of the challenges of international travel. Touring with a full band is costly, and without the six semis, the team will take a more minimalistic approach to hardware. Still, Illenium pledges to bring the “sweaty crazy rock show vibes,” and Flynn is adamant that the international portion is “an investment in the future.”
“We’ve played some European shows before, and getting to the point where we can bring the band has always been in the back of our minds,” Flynn says. “It just feels like a natural progression — and if these shows are successful, it’s only going to help grow everything.”
The crown jewel of the tour, however, is Trilogy: Colorado, to be held on June 17 at Empower Field at Mile High in Illenium’s hometown of Denver. With a 76,125-capacity, the stadium — home of the Denver Broncos — dwarfs Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium, where the producer held his first Trilogy show on July 3, 2021 to a sold-out audience, becoming the first artist to play the venue in the process. (Although Allegiant Stadium can hold a maximum of 65,000 people, the size of Illenium’s production reduced the stadium’s capacity to 40,000). The event grossed $3.9 million and sold 33,000 tickets, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore.
On March 30, Illenium announced that Trilogy: Colorado has already outsold its predecessor. “It’s gonna be the biggest show I’ve ever played,” he says, in a tone more even-keeled than one might expect given the magnitude of the statement. (At the ILLENIUM release party on April 28, the producer also confirmed that a third Trilogy show is in the works and will come to Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium in 2024.)
Illenium is used to setting and shattering his own records. In recent years, he’s arisen as one of dance music’s most prominent, active and successful acts, playing — and selling out — some of the country’s largest stadiums and arenas, including Madison Square Garden in September of 2019. While interest in dance music in the United States is healthy, only a few of its acts — Kaskade, Kx5, Swedish House Mafia, Skrillex with Fred again.. & Four Tet and ODESZA among them — sell out arenas and stadiums, and in some cases only for one-off shows. Illenium became one of these acts through a strategic focus on scaling the size of his events year over year.
“Everything we’ve done throughout Nick’s career has always come down to asking, ‘How do we push things forward?’” Flynn says. “When booking a tour, we’ve always looked to the next highest capacity venue in the area and tried to secure that for the next tour. Or if that didn’t make sense, we’d try to do two nights at the same venue… We’ve always just tried to take whatever that next step was in major markets.”
Fans are of course at the heart of this success. Illenium’s music forges deep bonds with listeners, who have “grown with Nick from when we first started,” says Flynn. The debut Illenium album dropped in 2016, and although he has yet to score a top 40 crossover hit on the Hot 100 (his sole entry to date, “Takeaway” with The Chainsmokers and Lennon Stella, peaked at No. 69), his dance stardom is well-illustrated on Dance/Electronic Songs, where he’s earned seven top 10 hits. Forty-eight of his songs have graced the chart, including ILLENIUM’s lead single, “Luv Me a Little.”
In recent years, his success has also extended well beyond the charts. In 2022, he won his first Billboard Music Award when Fallen Embers triumphed in the top dance/electronic album category, an award handed out on the live telecast. In 2021, the same LP scored him his first Grammy nomination for best dance/electronic album. Fans have come along for the ride, with many catching flights to Cancún to attend his festival, Ember Shores. Following its 2021 launch, the event sold out in less than two hours. Its 2022 installment also sold out, and this year’s iteration this December is on track to do the same.
These wins are why Illenium, who calls himself “super-sensitive to crap online” and says he’s previously deleted his social media apps, became “a little more nervous” in the weeks leading up to the release of his eponymous LP. Although rock elements are not new to his music, ILLENIUM marks his heaviest embrace of them yet. With “symphonic Hans Zimmer-esque stuff” and features from Blink-182’s Travis Barker and All Time Low, the album diverges from the synth drop dominance of his previous LPs. In a December 2022 Reddit comment that felt like a disclaimer, Illenium called the LP his “favorite” — but acknowledged, “it’s definitely not gonna be everyone’s favorite.”
“Even though the majority of my fans definitely support whatever I’m going to try, I’m susceptible to the trolls,” he says. “Everyone has emotions and is a human … it’s easy to second guess myself, even though [the album] is already done.”
He says he’s transformed the album for the tour, and that while “it’s still gonna be extremely live and rock, I’ve made a lot of changes to the live show so it’s still familiar to fans.”
“It’s not just full-on metal freaking craziness,” he continues. “It’s this middle ground that I think people are gonna be really surprised by and stoked about. I think it’s gonna sound better than any of the other live shows [I’ve done].”
Now 32, Illenium has both the self-possession of an artist who knows how the game works and the openness of one who’s new to it. With a sharp sense of self and what music he finds “fulfilling” to make along with clarity of what he wants out of his career — “an impact that is original and unique” — it seems that stifling his creative interests for fear of what people might say would sting more than any negative comment could.
He says he’s gained insight and clarity over the last few years, but remains a “very impatient” person who struggles to “take a second and just chill,” making the delineation between his personal and professional often opaque.
“I’m a recovering drug addict,” he says, “and I’m very one-track-minded, like addicted-mode-on for the show. Whatever it is, [I focus on] doing it and maxing out as hard as I possibly can on it. I haven’t really grown out of that.”
Illenium, who previously struggled with opiate addiction and got clean in 2012 after overdosing on heroin, is partnering with the non-profit End Overdose on the tour to train attendees on how to administer naloxone — used to reverse opiate overdoses — and recognize signs of an overdose.
At this stage in his life and career, he’s also newly thinking about his legacy. Making albums that are essentially copies of each other strikes him as “soulless,” and ILLENIUM — a project that he calls “the core sound of who I am” — has roots in his middle school days, when alt rock, metalcore and pop-punk first forged his own bond with music. Though much has changed for him since, his love for these genres has not. By engaging with these early influences on ILLENIUM, he’s arguably the most himself that he’s ever been on an album.
“Whenever you first listen to something and it has a deep impact on you, I think that stays with you, and I think that’s what happened to me with this type of music,” he says. “It’s just a very deep emotional connection.”
Rising singer-songwriter Paris Paloma remembers exactly when she realized she had something special with “Labour.” It was the last day in a week-long studio session with producer Justin Glasco in Los Angeles, and she was preparing to record vocals for the climactic bridge to the stormy alt-folk anthem, with fellow women backup singers Natalie Duque, Nolyn Ducich and Annabel Lee. “That was a moment where I was like, ‘This is coming together as a song now,’ ” she recalls. “Because us women, just all shouting in a room — I was like, ‘This is what it’s about.’ ”
“Labour” has inspired no shortage of women doing exactly that since its March release. The single initially became a sensation on TikTok for Paloma’s mighty vocals and powerful message about having to do all the emotional heavy lifting in a relationship — and to a lesser extent, for her strikingly British pronunciation of the word “capillaries” (cuh-pill-uh-rees). (“I stand by the British pronunciation of it!” she insists. “I don’t think the American one sounds nice, I’m sorry.”) It has quickly become the 23-year-old U.K. singer-songwriter’s breakout hit, debuting at No. 9 on Billboard’s Hot Alternative Songs chart (dated April 8) and No. 13 on the all-genre Digital Song Sales listing — while in her home country, it entered at No. 29 on the Official Songs Chart.
Hailing from Ashbourne, Derbyshire in England, Paloma began writing music when she was 14, and started recording and releasing her own work in 2020. At the beginning of the pandemic, she attracted the attention of High Plateau Productions owner/CEO David Fernandez when he was invited to virtually attend a songwriter session. “Paris was the first to sing and literally, as soon as she opened her mouth, I pinged her on Instagram,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Hey, look, I’m the weird dude in the room… let’s take a phone call.’ ”
Bora Aksu dress and coat.
Nicole Nodland
Fernandez officially came on as her manager in March 2021. “It was basically just me and her,” he remembers of their early days together. “With my limited knowledge of mixing and mastering, [we were] both learning Logic at the exact same time.” While Paloma’s voice is what immediately drew Fernandez in, he soon became even more enamored with her songwriting: “Just the content that she writes about, and the meaningfulness of her lyrics — it touches me as a music listener.”
Paloma scored a minor breakthrough in 2022 with her biblically framed relationship analysis “The Fruits,” attracting the attention of Nettwerk Records, who she signed with that fall. Her first time recording in a proper studio was last September for “Labour” — a song she’d originally written as two separate works, before realizing they shared a theme. “They’re [about] the same thing — putting too much labor into a relationship where you’re not having it returned,” she explains. “And how common of an experience that is for women, because of the way that we’ve been programmed to view heterosexual relationship dynamics. And it’s so normalized.”
Bora Aksu dress.
Nicole Nodland
Upon hearing the song’s demo for the first time, Fernandez insisted that it would need reinforcements beyond the two of them and a laptop: “I just knew if I could get her in with Justin [Glasco] and add [his] sprinkle of fairy dust on top of the thing — I had a really, really good feeling.” Even before they put it to tape, though, the song was already starting to garner interest, thanks to an early clip Paloma posted to TikTok in August, teasing lyrics for the song that she’d just penned.
“I often do videos whilst I’m songwriting, and I did that the first evening when I wrote the lyrics for what ended up being the bridge,” she says. “It was just a video of me in my room singing these words that I’d written like, 20 minutes before… but it gave me a little indicator that was like, ‘OK, I think this is something that I want to be heard, and I think people want to hear it.’ ”
Those early signs proved right on the money when the full song was released through Nettwerk in March, drawing not only millions of streams but countless responses on TikTok from fans who found the themes to be resonant — and not just from women. “I’ve got several messages from men who’ve realized [from the song] that they should be doing better in relationships,” Paloma says. “That’s amazing. Because I keep getting asked, ‘What can we do to solve this?’ And it’s not up to women: That’s the whole point. It’s up to men to listen and to take action.”
Bora Aksu dress and veil.
Nicole Nodland
Through the success of “Labour” and Paloma’s other songs, she has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok. But Fernandez is insistent that neither he nor Paloma want her to be seen as a “TikTok artist” — which is part of the reason they declined to release sped-up or slowed-down versions of “Labour,” instead opting to record a totally reimagined, more orchestral version of the song with production duo Myriot that’s dropping soon. “It’s just not falling into that trap of, ‘Let’s copy what everyone is doing right now,’ ” Fernandez says. “Let’s try to forge our own way. And if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”
Paloma is now getting ready to play some live shows at 300-500-cap spaces in London and upcoming festival dates at Summerfest and Bonnaroo. She’s also beginning to think about a debut album, which Fernandez says fans can most likely expect in July or August. By then, it will have been about a year since she wrote “Labour.”
“It’s already been a lot of time in between,” she says. “In that time, I’ve written a lot newer music, which — not to say that it’s better, but you always think that your most recent stuff is the best, because it’s the most accurate reflection of where your creativity is. I’ve got so much work I want to get out.”
Paris Paloma (left) and David Fernandez photographed on April 18, 2023 in London.
Nicole Nodland
A version of this story will appear in the May 13, 2023, issue of Billboard.
This story is part of Billboard‘s K-Pop Issue.
When J.Y. Park and Monte Lipman announced their forthcoming competition series A2K — standing for America to Korea — in July 2022, the respective founders of JYP Entertainment and Republic Records vowed to jointly produce “the first American artist made out of the K-pop system.” It was something of a full-circle moment for Park, who has eyed South Korean-to-American crossover success since JYP’s Wonder Girls became the first K-pop act to enter the Billboard Hot 100 in 2009. American artists are now clamoring for Park and other top Korean labels to notice them — and help them achieve their big break — in what has become a global race to launch a first-of-its-kind K-pop act.
While K-pop is short for “Korean pop,” genre fusion has always been one of its pillars and a big part of what has helped it reach new audiences — as has cultivating groups with members from countries outside of South Korea. Today, it’s common for trainees to come not only from China, Japan and Thailand but also countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and, now, the United States.
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“The whole strategy often started with having a member able to speak the language for the targeted market,” says John Yang, a U.S.-based entertainment executive who has spent 15 years in the Korean music business. “The K-pop industry realized the power of having members of that nation propelling more of the engagement among the fans and a much quicker local expansion.”
Now, with the genre’s growing popularity in major markets, K-pop stars are defined not by nationality, but by industry standards: years of rigorous training, contracts signed under a Korean agency, visual hallmarks (glossy videos, coordinated choreography) and release strategies involving multiple album drops each year.
“K-pop means ‘Korean popular music,’ ” Yang says. “I see this less as where it’s made, but more of who made it and how it’s produced. I may compare this with the restaurant business: It’s not the location defining it as ‘American,’ ‘Italian’ or ‘Korean,’ and also not about the ethnicity or race of its CEO, managers or even customers that defines cuisine, but more of cuisine consisting of the ingredients, recipes and techniques developed across that respective country.”
Despite the growing number of countries represented in K-pop, nearly all the artists are from Asia or of Asian descent. But the expanding definition of who can be a K-pop star is now seeing Korea’s industry leaders incorporating America’s diverse young talent into their system, regardless of race or ethnicity.
Initially, HYBE was the front-runner in this global gamble. A month before Big Hit Entertainment rebranded as HYBE in March 2021, chairman and then-CEO Bang Si-hyuk, alongside Universal Music Group chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge, revealed a strategic partnership that included assembling a “global” K-pop boy group in the United States under a new joint-venture label between Big Hit and Geffen Records. The plans to air worldwide auditions in 2022 with a “major U.S. media partner” changed a bit: HYBE and Geffen subsequently announced five American cities holding auditions for a “global girl group” in March and April 2022 before expanding the auditions to Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom and South Korea for December 2022-January 2023.
In that time, A2K launched its own American Idol-style auditions, bringing Park to Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Dallas and Los Angeles to select contestants to attend an L.A. “boot camp” reminiscent of The X Factor’s, with semifinalists then flying to JYP Entertainment’s Seoul headquarters for what A2K described as “intensive training” with music, dance and business executives. Winners will be part of a supergroup under JYP and Republic Records for all music releases — just like TWICE, Stray Kids and ITZY, which have earned seven top 10 albums on the Billboard 200, including two No. 1s by Stray Kids, since the companies partnered in 2020. TWICE, Stray Kids and JYP’s Japan-based girl group NiziU were all created on similar competition shows and officially debuted three to six months after their respective finales.
While JYP and HYBE worked directly with label partners, SM Entertainment connected directly with MGM Worldwide Television Group for its global venture. SM announced a partnership in May 2021 with MGM and its then-chairman, Mark Burnett, for a competition series forming NCT-Hollywood, a U.S. offshoot of SM’s boy band collective NCT, which has splinter groups across Korea, China and Japan. At the time, an insider told Billboard the show had been in development even before the pandemic — but Burnett’s late-2022 exit from MGM, Lee Soo-man’s controversial ousting from SM earlier this year and an announcement from SM’s new CEOs that the NCT system would halt expansion after a Tokyo-based team launches in 2023 raise questions about the project. (SM declined to comment for this story, as did Republic Records and Geffen Records — a reluctance likely born out of the high degree of competition and similar timelines to launch that they’re operating on.)
While no major U.S. label has made an earnest attempt, American and British “K-pop” groups have been launched before. Dubbed “the world’s most controversial ‘Korean’ band” by the BBC, EXP EDITION began in 2014 as Columbia University student Bora Kim’s master’s thesis that explored the meaning of K-pop music. Kim held auditions to form a band of six non-Korean men who would undergo a truncated version of the years of rigorous training K-pop hopefuls commit to in Seoul with voice coaching, dance rehearsals, language lessons and media training. Supporters donated $30,000 through Kickstarter and, with the help of a private investor, Kim and four of the six EXP EDITION members moved to Korea.
EXP EDITION booked prime K-entertainment TV slots like Mnet’s M Countdown and KBS2’s Immortal Songs, but experts criticized its inability to achieve captivating, onstage perfection — and the group’s 2018 debut EP, First Edition, was its sole release.
KAACHI, created by Frontrow Records and branded as the first London-based K-pop group, faced similar criticism. Unlike EXP EDITION, KAACHI did have one Korean member. Its 2021 music video “Get Up” was sponsored by a Seoul theme park, and the group performed publicly alongside top K-pop stars at the time. Still, the group disbanded in less than two years.
But crucially, today’s ventures to create global K-pop groups have the backing of some of the most powerful companies — Korean and American — in the music business. Whether or not the artists these initiatives yield break through on the Billboard charts, Yang sees future group launches as the ultimate indicator of a healthy, locally grown K-pop presence in America — much in the same way SM, JYP, HYBE and their counterparts have done for decades now in Asia.
“The most obvious indicators of the success of these projects would be Billboard charting, which will only result with the support of their fans without doubt,” he says. “However, the longevity of these partnerships and the birthing of more groups consistently will be the significant historical marker.”
This story originally appeared in the April 22, 2023, issue of Billboard.
This story is part of Billboard‘s K-Pop Issue.
In March, HYBE founder/chairman Bang Si-hyuk issued a dire warning: “K-pop,” he concluded, “is in crisis.” HYBE is the music company behind BTS, the group that spearheaded K-pop’s dramatic international growth in recent years, but Bang sounded alarmed about the genre’s health. K-pop’s momentum was faltering, he said, claiming fewer tracks from the genre charted on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022 than in 2021. The following month, BTS’ Jimin released his solo debut album, and the single “Like Crazy” arrived at No. 1 on the Hot 100. Still, his comments dovetailed with general industry anxiety about the dearth of new acts breaking into the mainstream and the challenge of maintaining growth in a ferociously competitive landscape, where around 100,000 new songs hit streaming services daily.
Within K-pop, some executives are concerned about the extent to which the genre can continue to produce massive international hits without BTS’ firepower while the group is on hiatus. “Although I wouldn’t go so far as calling it a ‘crisis,’ I do share [Bang’s] underlying sense of urgency that the Korean music industry is very much at an important crossroads,” says Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Seoul-based artist and label services agency.
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K-pop’s ascent to global prominence was, Cho says, “inextricably linked [with] and heavily reliant on the singular artistic visions” of executives at a few key companies — notably SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment and JYP Entertainment. “It has become an open source of debate these days, from boardrooms to chat rooms, that steadfastly sticking to this single-lane approach may no longer be the right direction” if the industry hopes to “futureproof” K-pop.
Executives who work in and around the genre are quick to pinpoint one big reason for the recent lack of K-pop in the upper reaches of the Hot 100: In June 2022, BTS — which has topped the chart four times on its own and twice more as a collaborator with Western artists — announced its potentially yearslong hiatus. “Their vacancy is definitely going to put a bit of a hole in the market,” says Eddie Nam, CEO of EN Management (Eric Nam, Epik High).
But there’s disagreement on whether hit singles in the United States are the best gauge of the genre’s health in the first place. On the Billboard 200, K-pop albums continue to hit No. 1 thanks to robust physical sales of CD variants; last year, K-pop groups topped the chart four times — Stray Kids twice and BTS and BLACKPINK once each — setting a new high-water mark for K-pop. “Most K-pop groups are built on a strong fan base, and their loyalty and support for their artists is much more organized than in the past,” says YG Entertainment USA’s former president Joojong Joe. “These fandoms know that Billboard chart positioning is important to their artists, and they organize album purchases and promotion within their fandom in the first week of an album’s release in order to get it to the top of the charts.”
But recently, K-pop acts haven’t scaled the same heights on the Hot 100. The biggest recent non-BTS K-pop hit was BLACKPINK’s “Pink Venom” last year, which peaked at No. 22. In the United States, the genre’s singles often perform phenomenally on the downloads chart — mirroring their dominance in physical sales — but less well on the streaming and radio rankings. “Like Crazy,” for example, sold 254,000 downloads, easily topping Digital Song Sales, but clocked in at No. 35 on the Streaming Songs chart. BTS’ previous No. 1, the Coldplay collaboration “My Universe,” also topped Digital Song Sales in its first week but landed at No. 21 on Streaming Songs.
Getting airplay in the United States remains K-pop’s biggest challenge: BTS has spent 17 cumulative weeks atop the Hot 100 but hasn’t made it past No. 5 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart, and BLACKPINK hasn’t even cracked the top 20 on Pop Airplay. The airplay audience for “Like Crazy” is the lowest for a Hot 100 No. 1 this decade. “I don’t think we’ve seen Korean music take over U.S. radio in any way,” Nam says. This remains true even as most of the biggest K-pop acts now work with American major labels, which have long-standing radio promo teams.
As Joe points out, K-pop artists aren’t necessarily so different from others outside the United States when it comes to that airplay disadvantage. “You’re in the country for promotion for only a short amount of time,” he explains. “You have to prioritize — you have a late-night show on TV; you have a concert; you have a photo shoot. It takes a lot of time to build relationships at radio, and it has not been easy for Korean artists to do that in the short amount of time they have here.”
In addition, many K-pop singles are only partially in English, which may make them a tougher sell at radio — a medium not known for taking risks. (Bad Bunny is one of the biggest artists in the world, but he has never made it past No. 19 at pop radio as a lead artist.) Three of BTS’ biggest hits were entirely in English; two others were collaborations with prominent Western acts singing in English.
Others, like Michael Martin, senior vp of programming for Audacy, the second-largest radio company in the United States, dismiss the idea that language might be limiting K-pop’s airplay. Representatives for two other prominent radio conglomerates, iHeartRadio and Cumulus, declined to comment on K-pop airplay, though iHeart has been supporting rising acts like NewJeans, especially in cities on the West Coast, and had some of the few stations that played “Like Crazy” during its debut week.
However, there’s also an argument that in an increasingly global music marketplace, hits are no longer the most important indicator of a genre’s health — and that K-pop’s difficulty getting U.S. radio play ultimately doesn’t matter to its momentum. “I don’t think K-pop groups must have hit singles in the U.S. to succeed globally,” says Inkyu Kang, an associate professor at Penn State and the author of K-Pop: The International Rise of the Korean Music Industry. “K-pop had already been enjoyed by people around the world with diverse backgrounds before it reached the U.S.”
Those listeners continue to seek out music from the genre: K-pop groups accounted for four of the top 10 albums in the world last year, according to the most recent report from IFPI, up from two in 2020. Looking just at sales rather than overall consumption, K-pop acts have a whopping eight out of the top 10, up from four in 2020. “Last year, the K-pop industry had the highest album sales overseas in history,” though growth in album sales slowed significantly, says Stephanie Choi of SUNY Buffalo’s Asia Research Institute, who is working on a book on K-pop. Japan, China and the United States were the three biggest importers of K-pop albums.
“You have to look at the whole pie,” says Lucas Keller, who manages Jenna Andrews, co-writer of BTS’ runaway hit “Butter.” “K-pop has one of the most committed fan bases in the history of music. You have to look at the touring, the merchandise and the audience, not just the charts.”
“When I speak to folks in the industry,” Keller adds, “we all believe that Korean pop acts have a real seat at the table now — including a shot at Western success in a way that was more difficult in past years.”
This story originally appeared in the April 22, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In Billboard’s monthly emerging dance artist spotlight we get to know Yunè Pinku, the 20-year-old artist building fantastical realms with her otherworldly voice and textured sonics.
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The Project: Babylon IX EP, out April 28 on Platoon
The Origin: Born and raised in London, Malaysian-Irish artist Yunè Pinku worked a number of odd jobs before becoming a musician — including, as she told The Line of Best Fit, as a bartender, and as an intern both at Prada and at a crystal shop. Though she had learned to play piano, she seemingly found her comfort zone at her computer, where she began carving out ambient soundscapes with downloaded production software. Soon after, she started writing songs inspired by bedroom pop and what she described as “Bladee-weird Drain Gang stuff.”
During lockdown, Pinku channeled the energy she missed from dance music and going out into her experimentations. “Then I tried adding vocals on top of that, which were originally just gonna be placeholders,” she tells Billboard. By the time restrictions were lifted, she had made over 150 songs.
Despite not having any official releases to her name, Pinku earned a big co-sign from U.K. stalwart Joy Orbison (with whom she worked in music sessions), who invited her to contribute a guest mix to his Radio 1 residency in July 2021. Two months later, she featured on Logic1000’s single “What You Like,” followed by her solo debut “Laylo” in November.
To start 2022, she found another big supporter in The Blessed Madonna, who named Pinku one to watch on her BBC Radio 6 New Year’s Day broadcast. Last April, she released her debut EP, Bluff, which led to billboard support from major streaming services and one of its tracks, “DC Rot,” landing on the FIFA 23 video-game soundtrack. (“My inner hooligan’s gassed,” she wrote on Instagram).
The Sound: Pinku has called her work “music for introverted ravers.” It juxtaposes electronic productions — an ever-evolving blend of U.K. garage, breakbeats, house, trance and more — with pop-structured songwriting to create a sound that’s animated enough for bedroom raving, yet mellow enough for introspective night drives.
But beneath the dance-y beats, a shadowy undercurrent runs through Pinku’s lyrics. Bluff, for instance, reflects the anxiety and angst of spending lockdown in isolation before re-learning how to navigate the outside world. Newer song “Night Light” takes the perspective of an AI searching for its maker.
“I would say I’ve got a default setting in my brain that’s quite existential,” she says. “A small thing could send me off into a doom scenario where I’ll be like, what’s the meaning of life, who are we? So I think it’s sort of these traces that come through.”
Part of Pinku’s strength is her use of textures, no doubt a remnant of her early soundscape sketches. Subtle sonics such as glittering synth constellations, the whirs of a machine powering up and softened glitches make her songs seem like they transcend the aural into the physical world.
“I’ve always really liked anything that sounds a bit twinkly or sparkly,” she says. “Textures are to me like 50% of a song, ‘cause you could have like a really good beat, but the textures and extra effects are how you make it interesting and more emotional.” Pinku even often treats her own otherworldly vocals as an instrument to blend and manipulate. But as she’s grown confident in her voice, she’s more open to bringing it closer to the forefront.
The Record: As Pinku was writing her new EP, she envisioned it taking place in a metaverse or cyber-realm — “So I thought, like, the idea of Babylon,” she says, “or like, the hanging gardens and cloud nine, where it’s these fantastical realms of existence.”
Pinku’s own fantastical realm took time to mold. Before Bluff, music had simply been a hobby. Post-release, she realized just how many eyes were on her. “There was like a five-month period where I literally couldn’t come up with any music, ‘cause I was like, ‘Oh god, they’re all gonna hate the music,’” she recalls. Then, during a breakthrough studio session in which she says she felt like she was “dying of hay fever,” she made two tracks in one day. One of those was recent single “Fai Fighter,” a bright, bouncy track which opens with an unhinged scream and features Pinku’s voice slicing through the air with its piercing whoops.
Whereas Bluff dons a shield of bravado and toughness, Pinku describes Babylon IX as being “gentler” and “more vulnerable on the lyrical side”: “This one is more about a delve into parts of desperation or being honest with yourself about yourself.” Her newest single, “Sports,” laments the idea of someone putting their screens before their IRL relationships over barraging drums and thunderous synths, while on opening track “Trinity,” she softly muses, “I never wanna be this lonely.” Additional tracks “Heartbeat” and “Blush Cut” bring out the EP’s dreamier, more delicate side with their crystalline production. It’s intimate yet vast, sad but sweet.
“Me and my friend were talking about it the other day,” Pinku says, “and we were saying [the EP sounds as] if a DJ was trying to summon a spirit on a mountain or something.”
Managed By: Emma Reid & Ferdy Hall, Outlier Artists
Management Strategy: “Our main aim managing Yunè has always been to make sure that this whole process remains not only fun and creative for her, but grows at a rate that she’s comfortable with,” say Reid and Hall. “This means saying ‘no’ to things is just as important as saying ‘yes.’ Growing her team independently via artist services company Platoon has allowed us the space and time to consider each step forward. Focusing on her long term ambitions rather than being preoccupied with short term trends that can often box in an artist’s growth rather than encourage it. This plays into our measurement for success, as long as we take a step forward with every move, then our plan and strategy is working.
“Her biggest strength as an artist,” they continue, “is the quantity of quality music she’s able to make fast and her ability to envision the world that should sit around her releases. All we need to do is lean into that and put the pieces around her to make sure it’s all coming to life.”
First Song That Made Her Love Dance Music: Pinku was not a dance music fan growing up, thinking it to be only the trance her mother played around the house, but lockdown led to a change of heart. When she left her Spotify running in the background, the algorithm’s resultant “clubby drums” breached her subconscious. Pinku specifically remembers hearing songs from New York-based artist Eartheater’s 2019 album Trinity during those run-ons:
“They’re like trappy, kind of electronic, weird, blend stuff,” she says. “It’s cool ‘cause it’s quite experimental. It’s a mix of multiple genres and it kind of made me think, club music and electronic are like a whole [spectrum], and not just this or that.”
Advice Every New Dance Artist Needs to Hear: “Don’t be afraid to experiment or get quite weird with it. It’s electronic: you have so much space and there’s no rules with it, really.”
Why She Makes Music: “I think it’s just something I just do regardless of if anyone was listening to it. To me, it’s like getting things out of your soul in a way, which sounds very deep, but it’s like a diary for me. You free yourself a bit when you put it into a song.”
Up Next: In Pinku’s words: “A lot of shows.” She embarks on the next leg of her U.K./European tour next month, and in June she’ll venture this side of the pond for her first U.S. live shows at Brooklyn’s Elsewhere (June 15) and Los Angeles’ El Cid (June 22). SoCal fans can catch her again at HARD Summer (Aug. 5).
The rest of 2023 isn’t all planes and stages, though. Pinku’s also thinking about her eventual debut album. “I always enjoy the early stage of putting a project together ‘cause you’re just throwing out ideas of what you want it to be,” she says. “So I’m still kind of in the early stage where I’m just making tracks here and there and seeing if there’s any sound overall that’s coming out clearly and then just tweaking away at them.”